Kroger has several brands including Kroger, Ralphs, Food4Less, QFC, Fred Meyer and many more.
When you shop at their stores and use their loyalty card, or you enter your phone number at the check out to get a small discount, or you have a Kroger/Fred Meyer app on your phone – they track all of your purchases. If the app is on your phone, Kroger stores can ping the app via Bluetooth as you move about the store. Yes, they literally track your location in the store if you have their app on your phone.
Based on your purchases they may also infer your health conditions.
Kroger also combines your shopping history with 3rd party services that track you about the Internet.
They admit all of this on their privacy page, which no one looks at: Privacy Policy – Kroger
In most cases, they retain all data collected and inferred about you forever – as long as you are a customer (how do you tell them you are no longer a customer?)
Kroger also sells customer data to other third parties – as described in the following, Kroger sells your data to Roku and others who use that information for targeted advertising:
Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You – The Markup
Kroger has proposed to acquire Albertson’s / Safeway grocery stores, at which point they would have detailed information on about 75% of all U.S. households.
Note also that Rite-Aid was secretly using cameras and facial recognition software to track customers – a “feature” which they are now banned from using for the next five years: Business: Rite-Aid prohibited from using facial recognition technology – Coldstreams
